Openly defending one’s decision not to have children will be prosecuted in Russia. The State Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament, is preparing a bill under which authorities will impose fines of up to €50,000 ($55,580) for supporting “the refusal to have children.” The measure affects all areas of life — from casual conversation to films and books — and is a serious threat to the Russian feminist movement.
The crackdown on what the Kremlin calls the “childfree” movement will result in fines of up to 400,000 rubles for individuals (around $4,300), 800,000 rubles for civil servants ($8,600), and up to five million rubles ($55,580) for companies or other legal entities. Foreigners will also be deported.
There are thousands of reasons why a person may decide not to have children, but the Cabinet of ministers has asked the State Duma to make only three exceptions to the law: religious reasons, medical reasons or in the case of rape. It also alleges that there is a mass-organized childfree movement, even though the websites on this subject are little more than a curiosity; Russian newspapers cite the existence of groups on VKontakte, the Russian Facebook, which barely have 5,000 members.
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Breed for your Nation, or else!
(This statement is applicable to every right wing movement)
Great… How many weeks do you think it’ll take Republican creeps to parrot the same proposal?
They’ve already documented those intentions in project 2025
lol, if they deport foreigners, even if they don’t want children, that leaves them with even less population 🙃
Russian President Vladimir Putin said in early September that his government must create the conditions “so that having many children becomes fashionable again, as it used to be – seven or 10 people in a family.”
Getting back up to a sustainable TFR of 2.1 hasn’t been achieved by a number of countries that have tried. I don’t think that there’s any chance that Russia is going to hit between 7 and 10 via trying to control the information enviornment.
But we shall see.
Lmao
I disagree with policies that constrain speech, would not want to do this in the US, and I’m skeptical that this is going to work, but I will give them this: Russia does have a serious demographic problem, and they’re at least trying to solve it.
https://www.populationpyramid.net/russian-federation/2023/
There are a long list of points on which Russia has constrained speech that have fuck-all to deal with real national concerns and are just about benefiting the current government in power at the expense of the country. But here, they’re actually trying to address a real and serious national problem.
And Russia volunteering to be a guinea pig will at least provide data that benefits everyone else. If it works, then we learn something, and if it doesn’t work, then we learn something. My guess is that it’ll be the latter, but this is the empirical way to determine that.
We don’t have a policy answer yet to maintaining a sustainable fertility rate either, so it’s not as if we have a tested alternative available.
I’m not sure “shut up and fuck… or else” counts as actual policy.
…hey’re at least trying to solve it.
Forced births by not allowing abortion or speech about not having children is not solving the problem.
Doing something to promote wanting to have children, like social supports, would be trying to solve the problem.
